Foster your understanding – Five key factors for success

Effective negotiation also means understanding. Those who skilfully develop and expand their comprehension of the other party enter into negotiations with the most promising perspectives.
Particularly encouraging: To gain a better understanding can be trained. Learn from our 5 tips on how to optimise your chances in negotiations.

Ask questions, don’t hold monologues

When it comes to important negotiations, we tend to write down much of what we want to say in advance. This practice leads to a lot of telling and little listening.

We recommend that you structure your preparation for your next negotiation differently. Aim to create as comprehensive and detailed a list of the other side’s possible interests in the related negotiation. You may well notice that you do not yet understand the other side as well as you think you should. The realisation of these knowledge and understanding gaps should encourage you to draft meaningful and, above all, open-ended questions.

Practise active listening

While we know that we should develop our “active listening” skills, we yet wait too often to practice this skill until the next important negotiations. This is obviously unwise. Use instead your less important, i.e. every day negotiations to improve these important skills.

It doesn’t even need to be a so-called negotiation. Next time you might have a disagreement with someone – be it in a partnership, with friends or at work – just think about how many questions you can ask without unnecessarily revealing your own position. Listening attentively means that you are fully focused on the other person’s perspective and not your own.

You will find that this is more difficult than it sounds. Set goals for this exercise and try to ask more questions each time.

Let them tell you about the problem

Talk to the person with whom you had an argument. Tell her that you are worried that you might not have understood her perspective well enough and that you would like to learn more about her situation.

Keep asking questions until you feel that there is no more information to gather, and then summarise your counterpart’s perspective. Your goal should be to understand your counterpart’s perspective well enough to make them say: “Yes, that’s right!”

The power of silence

Now comes the difficult part: Don’t end the conversation by just framing your counterpart’s perspective. Instead, simply say, “Thank you, this has helped me to better understand your side of the story.” Then wait and let the silence in the room do its magic. Because the other side finally feels heard, they will start to contribute in a very constructive and problem-solving way – more than not without beeing asked to do so, just because of the silence in the room.

Learnings

1. Ask questions, don’t talk
2. Prepare questions of interest to explore the other side’s perspective
3. Practise your listening skills in less important negotiations
4. Frame your understanding and have it acknowledged
5. Let the silence do its magic

Prepare 15 questions for the next negotiation. Why so many? Well, drafting 15 meaningfull questions requires an intensive reflection on the case, one’s own perspective, the possible perspective of the other side, the different interests and different scenarios. Correspondingly, negotiators who invested this time are well prepared for what is ahead of them. On the other hand, it rarely makes sense to ask all the questions at hand. Define the questions you need to ask and keep the rest back in case things are getting difficult.